But first, some reminiscing

I was first exposed to the internet in 1993 when an uncle sent me a 2,400bps (that's Bps, no K) modem. I connected using Compuserve software on a 386SX machine with Windows For Workgroups 3.11. The browser was Mosaic (this is pre-Netscape and IE). Every web page was made up of black writing on a grey background.

It took fifteen minutes to display a large photo so I would set the browser to ignore all pictures, I would then have to try and figure out which pictures I wanted to see, right-click them and ask the browser to download the image. I would then sit back and watch as the picture came in line by line. I used SMTP, NNTP, Gopher and of course was paying by the minute for the phone call.

But my word it was exciting! I would get through those 'First 20 hours free' CDs from AOL/Compuserve in a weekend. Signing up Friday night and cancelling after 20 hours use on the Sunday. I worked the system, and in those days nobody noticed. I'd fire up the AOL/Compuserve software, minimise after checking my empty email box and sticking with the buggy, early browsers. I didn't even jump ship to IE until version 3.

This access to the rest of the world was an incredible experience. I dabbled with IRC, used the earliest versions of Yahoo, listened to radio stations using RealMedia. This was all long before Google, before Flash, before MP3s. I even remember using Google before it had it's own domain name and piggybacked off Stanford's domain.

By the early 2000s broadband was slowly rolling out across the UK and I was still lumbered with a 56.6k connection. Tweaking my TTL and MTU to try and squeeze more out of my connection. In just seven years I'd seen the internet improve so much both in terms of what it could do and the content it provided. Yet I had reached a point where something I was happy to wait fifteen minutes for when time was a premium had become a frustrating experience waiting thirty seconds for in a time when I paid a flat rate for 24/7 access.

These days I have an 8 MBit, wireless connection that I can use anywhere in my home whenever I like for as long as I like. I can even access it on my cellphone. But I've become complacent. I take the internet for granted. I get frustrated when servers go down, or email isn't answered in a prompt manner. Each day I log on to the same few sites and rely on places like digg and reddit to let me know about good stuff on the internet. There's just too much junk to make 'surfing' from site to site an enjoyable experience.

In short, the joy and surprised to be found in stumbling across great content has been replaced by the frustration of not finding the content I now assume to be there.

Given the choice I would go back to 1993 without a second thought. I relied on one site linking to another to find new things. I would make notes, write down URIs in full in a small notebook. The fact is the internet just isn't as fun any more. Back then there were no adverts, no domain-squatters and very little spam. Most websites were run by amateurs and enthusiasts who maintained content by editing HTML by hand. There was no RSS to pull in content for elsewhere. No blogs, so we didn't have wade through opinion to get to the information we were after.

I miss the old, slow, black-on-grey, amateurish internet of searching libraries on Gopher and using public FTP servers to download shareware.

But all is not lost. In an effort to relive those days I'm going to stay up late, very late. Be as quiet as possible, as in those days I was petrified of waking my parents. This means no music, no tv, nothing. I will fire up an old browser and disappear in to The Internet Archive.